"Glutting the Maw of Death: Suicide and Procreation in
Frankenstein"

Richard K. Sanderson

South Central Review, 9:2 (Summer 1992), 49-64

[{49}] When Milton expressed
the hope that "fit audience"
would be found for his greatest poem, he did not have in mind
the Godwins and the Shelleys. Nevertheless, Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein draws something from every book of
Paradise Lost, especially from Book Ten, which describes
Adam's complaint against (and reconciliation with) his Creator.
Mary Shelley's clearest borrowing, of course, is the epigraph to the novel's first
edition (1818):

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?1

Although Frankenstein has been studied many times for
Miltonic echoes and "influences," little has been said about the
full context in which Adam's complaint appears.2 And yet that
context contains a debate over procreation and suicide -- issues
to which Mary Shelley was particularly sensitive and which
became major themes in her first novel. After reviewing the
dominance of these themes in Mary's life and in
Frankenstein, I will focus on an echo, in the monster's
very first speech, of Eve's
despairing proposal to Adam
that the two of them forego procreation, either through sexual
abstinence or through mutual self-destruction (Book 10: lines 967-1006).
This crucial moment in Paradise Lost, I shall argue,
offers a significant parallel to Victor's decision not to create
a female companion for the monster, a decision widely considered
the novel's turning-point. In Milton's portrait of a suicidal
Eve we find a juxtaposition of procreation and suicide which
Mary Shelley reworked into her own account of Eros and Thanatos
converging.

It has been virtually established by now that one of the deepest
concerns of Frankenstein is procreation. Victor's
creation of the monster is seen as displacing woman's natural
child-bearing role, and upon this resonant image of male
monstrosity critics have built a wide variety of gender-related interpretations.3 The novel is
commonly read as a critique of male egotism: in by-passing the
woman's procreative role, Victor reveals his fear of female
sexual autonomy and his own ambivalent femininity. The many dead
and {50} missing mothers in the book further reflect his
unnatural project and may also suggest Mary's feelings of loss
and guilt with regard to her own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin,
who succumbed to puerperal fever in 1797, ten days after
giving birth to Mary.4

Though not as frequently discussed as procreation, suicide is
also a major motif in Frankenstein, and one of the book's
achievements is its varied depiction of self-destructive wishes
and acts. In fact, the book is an imaginative contribution to
the heated debate over the morality and psychology of suicide
which was carried on throughout the eighteenth century.5 Roughly
speaking, that period saw the emergence of various secular
standpoints that challenged religious dogma. A variety of
rationalist, skeptical, libertine, and utilitarian thinkers came
to question the view maintained by most Christian authorities
(following St. Augustine, City of God, Book I) that
suicide was an absolute sin. At stake in the debate was more
than suicide per se, for suicide raised not only
specifically religious questions -- did a person's life belong
to God or to that person? -- but also the deepest questions
about the limits of individual freedom, the importance of
personal happiness, and the claims of a socially-based
morality.6

While Frankenstein addresses these matters in its own
striking way, it is uncertain how much direct familiarity Mary
Shelley had with positions on suicide already advanced by
others. Aside from the books of Godwin (discussed below), Mary
had read -- prior to the completion of Frankenstein --
such popular works as Goethe's The Sorrows of Young
Werther, Montesquieu's Persian Letters, and Rousseau's La Nouvelle
Heloïse.7 Goethe's story of the sensitive,
suicidal outcast, of course, forms part of the monster's
education in Frankenstein. In Montesquieu's work, Letter
LXXIV ("In Defence of Self-Murder") partly anticipates Hume's famous essay "Of Suicide"
in its argument that self-destruction offends neither society
nor "the Order of Providence."8 And Rousseau's highly influential
novel (Part III, letter 21) presents the view that killing
oneself is no sin against God and is constrained only by our
duty to others. Though Mary cannot be said to have immersed
herself in the polemical documents belonging to the suicide
debate, she was evidently conversant with the general lines of
argument. In any case, it seems most likely that her thoughts
and feelings about suicide owed less to her reading than to her
personal experiences and her
reflections upon them.

Although there is, of course, no simple connection between
Mary's life and her novel's analysis of suicidal states of mind,
I believe it is clear that death and suicide -- often in
association with pregnancy, legitimate or illegitimate --
figured importantly in her pre-Frankenstein history and
in her imagination. The young Mary Godwin, after all, had a
consuming interest in her mother's life. Whether from listening
to William Godwin himself or
from reading Mary
Wollstonecraft's published correspondence or from reading
her father's Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman (1798), Mary Godwin
would have known that her mother had twice {51} attempted
suicide in 1795
during her unhappy involvement with Gilbert Imlay. In her first
suicide attempt, Mary Wollstonecraft took an overdose of
laudanum (late spring of 1795); in the second, she jumped from
Putney Bridge into the Thames (October 1795).9 The first
attempt is apparently described in Wollstonecraft's unfinished
novel, the posthumously published The Wrongs of Woman: or,
Maria, which Mary Godwin read in 1814. The book
concludes, significantly, with a superscribed passage in which
Maria, suddenly presented with her lost baby daughter, vomits up
the laudanum she had just taken to kill herself and then cries
"The conflict is over! -- I will live for my child!"10 Such
knowledge of her mother's life and work must have given Mary
Godwin occasion to ponder, if only abstractly, the meaning of
suicide and its possible relations to motherhood. Offspring
could be a kind of counterweight to suicide, providing meaning,
stability, and human connectedness.11

The views of suicide published by her father -- to whom the
first edition of Frankenstein was dedicated -- would
certainly have been known to Mary. In his Memoirs and in
his Enquiry Concerning
Political Justice he argued that we do not think clearly
during episodes of self-destructive anguish; we forget that the
anguish may pass and that we may, in the future, enjoy periods
of "tranquillity and pleasure."12 He made no moral judgments but
expressed deep sympathy and spoke of rational chances for
happiness. Mary would probably have known that Godwin considered
her mother to be "a female Werter,"13 that alienated man of feeling
whose sensitivities lead him at last to suicide. And from
Godwin's own example, Mary would have learned the lesson that
was to aid her later in life -- that writing was one way to deal
with bereavement.14

The other principal male in Mary's life was, of course, Percy Shelley, who also
must have influenced her thoughts about self-destruction. Not
only in his philosophical opinions but also in his behavior,
Percy manifested a deep fascination with death, with suicide,
and with suicidal gestures as tokens of authentic feeling and as
weapons in a contest of wills. During his tempestuous courtship
of Mary Godwin in July of 1814, Percy proposed that they commit
suicide together; some days afterward he took an overdose of
laudanum and had to be revived.15

While Mary was in the midst of composing Frankenstein,
there occurred the suicides of her half-sister, Fanny (Imlay) Godwin, and of Harriet Shelley, Percy's
deserted wife. Both deaths may be seen in part as acts of
vengeance directed at Mary herself. Fanny was found dead of an
overdose of laudanum on October 10, 1816. Her painfully
self-effacing suicide note read:

I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put
an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate,
and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons
who have hurt their health in endeavoring to promote her
welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you
will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature
ever existed as. . . .

{52} According to the newspaper report, the signature "appeared
to have been torn off and burned."16

On December 10, 1816, two months after the suicide of Fanny, the
body of Harriet Shelley, Percy's wife, was found -- a suicide --
in the Serpentine River. She had been missing from her rented
lodgings, where she had lived under the name "Harriet Smith,"
for about one month. At the time of her death she was in an
advanced state of pregnancy.17

Sorting out the motives of a "successful" suicide, of course, is
a notoriously uncertain business -- even when far more evidence
is available than we have concerning the deaths of Fanny and
Harriet. Nevertheless, it seems clear that both women felt
themselves to be outcasts as a result of procreative activity.
Fanny was illegitimate -- of "unfortunate" birth -- and had
perhaps felt rejected when Percy fell in love with her
half-sister Mary Godwin.18 Harriet's shameful pregnancy may
have contributed to her suicide.19 And the methods of suicide chosen
by Fanny and Harriet express -- according to Freud, at least --
unconscious wishes for pregnancy and childbirth, respectively.20

More even than Fanny's suicide, with its aggressive overtones,
the death of Harriet fits the classic pattern of the
revenge-suicide. Harriet made no effort to conceal either her
suicidal thoughts or her rage at Percy's desertion. Just before
her death, she wrote a letter to her sister Eliza which
expresses the wish that Ianthe, her daughter by Percy, should
remain in Eliza's custody and which includes a direct address to
"My dear Bysshe":

Do not refuse my last request. I never could refuse you & if
you had never left me I might have lived, but as it is I freely
forgive you & may you enjoy that happiness which you have
deprived me of.21

The explicit written record of Mary's reaction to the suicides
is virtually blank. In her extant letters, the only (indirect)
mention of Fanny's suicide occurs in the very letter where we
would expect to find -- but do not -- a reference to Harriet's
newly discovered suicide.22 Mary's journal is no more
revealing.23
Whatever her own response to the suicide of Fanny, it was surely
complicated by the reaction of her father Godwin: afraid of
possible scandal, he refused to identify or to claim Fanny's
body, which was buried in a pauper's grave, and he falsely
claimed that Fanny had died of fever.24 If Mary herself ever entertained
thoughts of suicide, such treatment of her half-sister must have
given her pause.

Percy left an equally unrevealing written record, and scholars
have long speculated about his reaction to the suicide of his
wife.25
Nevertheless, we know from modern clinical studies that
survivors of suicide (sometimes referred to as
"survivor-victims") think and behave in ways that constitute a
recognizable syndrome.26 They are frequently beset by guilt
and by the need to deny that guilt; they often engage in mutual
reproach and self-justifying explanations of the dead person's
motives. The survivors of Harriet's {53} suicide certainly fit
this pattern, and the quarrels they began have been carried on
by biographers ever since. Harriet's champions blamed Percy,
primarily for his adulterous affair with Mary Godwin (who became
Mary Shelley a mere three weeks after Harriet's body was
discovered). Percy and his defenders cast aspersions on Harriet
and on her sister Eliza.27 Although Mary sided with Percy's
attempt to gain custody of his children, his defensive coldness
toward Harriet's death -- as well as his fascination with death
generally -- may have affected the story Mary was composing,
especially its portrait of Victor Frankenstein, which is widely
recognized as a partial representation of Percy.

Turning now to the novel, we may observe first how persistent is
Victor's tendency toward suicidal urges and ideation. Critics
generally agree that his desire to defeat death -- to deny his
own place in the natural scheme of things -- stems in part from
a longing for his own dead mother and is inherently suicidal.28 Upon
discovering "the secret of life," he brings forth a monster whom
he soon comes to consider "nearly in the light of my own
vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave and forced to
destroy all that was dear to me" (72) -- an explicit statement of
the doppelganger theme
that has become a commonplace of Frankenstein criticism.
It is curiously apt that Plutarch's Lives, one of the
monster's formative books, makes doubling -- the "paralleling"
of life-stories, often of a virtuous man and a vicious man --
its organizing principle.29 And suicide is almost a structural
necessity in doppelganger stories: in disposing of his unwelcome
double, the protagonist necessarily destroys some essential part
of himself.30 This feature of double tales,
interestingly, is consistent with psychological studies which
suggest that suicide often proceeds from confusion about the
self, from a contradictory fantasy of killing oneself and
living on.31
Between the two of them, Victor and the monster play out Karl
Menninger's well known "triad" of suicidal motives -- the wish
to kill others, the wish to be punished, and the wish simply to
perish.32

Early in the book Victor speaks of himself as one of the dead (48) -- by implication, our
mortality (from which he would free us) places us already among
the dead -- and this image occurs repeatedly in the course of
his various trance-like swoons and illnesses. Numerous times he
expresses an overt longing for death: when Justine is executed
(87), when he consents to the
monster's demand for a mate (145), when he throws into the
sea the body-parts that were to have composed that mate (169), and when he beholds
Clerval's murdered body (174,
179). Although cleared of
suspicion for Clerval's murder, he still suffers "paroxysms of
anguish and despair" and must be guarded constantly to be kept
from committing suicide (180). One crux in the novel is
Victor's utter incomprehension of the monster's threat -- "I
will be with you on your wedding-night" (166). It is at once obvious to
the reader that the monster intends to kill Elizabeth, but
Victor imagines the implied death-threat as being directed
against himself. Critics have seen Victor's "blindness" as
caused by his sexual anxiety, his fear of {54} women, and his
desire for the death of Elizabeth, who bears inadvertent
responsibility for the death of his own mother.33 Without
denying these readings, we may also understand Victor's
blindness as further proof of his fixation upon his own
wished-for death. And when Elizabeth is killed, Victor repeats
that wish (193).

Yet, for all of Victor's talk about suicide, the only figure who
commits the act is the monster. Though his death is not
portrayed within the novel, I cannot agree with those who --
possibly influenced by the persistence of the Frankenstein
"myth" in later literature and film -- claim that the monster
perhaps does not kill himself "after" the book's conclusion. He
has made good on his promises and threats throughout the book.
After what we have seen him suffer, and after his own
passionately imagined description of his fiery death, a further
account of the actual deed (presumably by Walton) would have
been anti-climactic. And the fact that we do not witness the
monster's death does not diminish the book's forceful
presentation of suicidal emotions and motives. The death
foretold by the monster illustrates that suicide is the
consequence of an isolated, unnatural life -- a life brought
into being by the wrong kind of procreation.

Like Victor, the monster carries thoughts of suicide with him
almost from the start. So long as he has hopes that Victor will
create a female companion for him, he is determined to cling to
life (95). But as he relates
the history of his own education, we see that he has already
glimpsed the possibility of suicide as an escape from his
anguish. The fullest picture he gets of suicide comes from
reading Goethe's Sorrows of Werther.
Yet although the book throws "so many lights . . .
upon what had hitherto been to me obscure subjects" (123), death and suicide are not
among the illuminated topics:

The disquisitions upon death and suicide were calculated to fill
me with wonder. I did not pretend to enter into the merits of
the case, yet I inclined towards the opinions of the hero, whose
extinction I wept, without precisely understanding it. (124)

Just as he ultimately rejects the comparisons between himself
and Milton's Adam and Satan, he is forced to
recognize that he also differs from the characters in
Werther. Unlike them, "I was dependent on none, and
related to none. 'The path of my departure was free;' and there
was none to lament my annihilation" (124). It is precisely because
of his isolation that, where Victor dashes his hopes for a mate,
the creature can only turn his rage outward -- he destroys
Victor's loved ones, thus making his creator's life as desolate
as his own. By contrast, Werther can achieve revenge by killing
himself (with Albert's pistol). Werther's suicide -- both
spiteful and pathetic -- leaves Albert in dismay and Lotte in
misery; Werther dies in a shower of kisses from the old bailiff
and his sons. But the monster knows that, aside from bringing
gladness and relief to his enemy, his own suicide {55} would
affect no one. So long as Victor lives and suffers, the monster
is "satisfied" (200), but
when his creator dies, the monster loses his only reason for
living. The suicide he foretells to Walton -- "I shall ascend my
funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the
torturing flames" (221) is
more than an act of self-punishment. Rebuffed by the entire
world, the monster hopes to annihilate that world.34

It may be noted, finally, that suicidal urges in the novel are
not restricted to the two chief antagonists. Mary Thornburg
argues that the book's women embody a masochistic, helpless
femininity which contributes to their own destruction.35 And the
narrator Walton, in certain respects an overreacher like Victor,
has willingly placed himself in the path of death:

I am surrounded by mountains of ice, which admit of no escape,
and threaten every moment to crush my vessel. . . . We
may survive; and if we do not, I will repeat the lessons of my
Seneca, and die with a good heart. (210)

The reference to Seneca is ambiguous. While it clearly suggests
that Walton intends to face death bravely, it may also hint at
Seneca's frequently repeated teaching that suicide was an
acceptable alternative to pointless suffering or dishonor (a
teaching Seneca ultimately enacted himself).36 To "repeat
the lessons" of Seneca could mean to kill oneself.

Having surveyed the prominence of suicide in Mary's early life
and in her first novel, we may now turn to Paradise Lost, a major text
in the Godwin household, in Percy's poetic development, and in
the monster's moral education. It is early in Book Ten that Adam
and Eve, having eaten the forbidden fruit, hear God's judgments
upon them (Book 10: lines
193-208). Both are punished by being made mortal -- a grim
reality which Milton renders throughout Book Ten by heavily
stressing the traditional idea of Death-the-devourer. In
addition, Eve receives a
judgment affecting all future procreation, and Adam is told he must work to
eat. The several hundred lines that follow are dominated by
images of sadistic oral consumption.37 Now that Man has fallen, a fallen
Nature turns hostile to Man and to itself:

Beast now with Beast gan war, and Fowl with Fowl,
And Fish with Fish; to graze the Herb all leaving,
Devour'd each other;

Adam admits that he deserves punishment (Book 10: lines 725-27), but
he knows that God's anger will extend as well to future
generations: "All that I eat or drink, or shall beget, / Is
propagated curse" (Book 10:
lines 728-29). Whether in eating, to preserve his own life,
or in procreating, he is simply keeping alive the effects of his
sin:

{56} O
voice once heard
Delightfully, Increase and multiply,
Now death to hear! for what can I increase
Or multiply, but curses on my head?
Who of all Ages to succeed, but feeling
The evil on him brought by me, will curse
My Head;

Less than ten lines later, he begins the complaint against his
Maker that Mary Shelley used as her epigraph.

Like Adam, Victor Frankenstein worries that "future ages" may
curse him. Having agreed to create a female companion for the
monster, he is forced to stop work by the reflection that

one of the first results of those sympathies for which the
daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be
propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of
the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.
Had I the right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon
everlasting generations? . . .I shuddered to think
that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness
had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price perhaps of
the existence of the whole human race. (163)

While critics have noted that Victor's fear of future curses
resembles Adam's, they have virtually ignored the full context
of Adam's speech and have therefore missed the true extent of
the parallel between Victor's situation and that of our first
parents. As Adam and Eve struggle to understand the consequences
of their disobedience, Eve proposes a way around her husband's
fear: they should simply cut short the human race. If they find
it "hard and difficult" to abstain from "Love's due Rites,
Nuptial embraces sweet" (Book
10: lines 993-94) -- in Victor's terms, to restrain their
thirst for "sympathies" -- they should commit suicide: "Let us
seek Death, or he not found, supply / With our own hands his
Office on ourselves" (Book
10: lines 1001-2). Milton prepares this startling revision
of the Genesis story in at least two ways that have a bearing on
Frankenstein. The first is the mention of suicide in the
description of the Limbo of Vanity (Book 3: lines 416-509), where
it is specifically linked with glory-seeking and monstrosity.
After Sin fills the works of men with vanity, the Limbo of
Vanity will contain "all who [like Victor] in vain things /
Built their fond hopes of Glory or lasting fame" (Book 3: lines 448-49) and "All
th' unaccomplisht works of Nature's hand, / Abortive, monstrous,
or unkindly mixt" (Book 3:
lines 455-56). In addition, Limbo will contain suicides like
Empedocles "who to be deem'd / A God, leap'd fondly into Aetna
flames" (Book 3: lines
469-70) -- an end that may remind us of the monster's own.
Secondly, Eve leads up to her despairing proposal in terms that
echo throughout Frankenstein:

{57} If care of our descent perplex us most,
Which must be born to certain woe, devour'd
By Death at last, and miserable it is
To be to others cause of misery,
Our own begott'n, and of our Loins to bring
Into this cursed World a woeful Race,
That after wretched Life must be at last
Food for so foul a Monster, in thy power
It lies, yet ere Conception to prevent
The Race unblest, to being yet unbegot.
Childless thou art, Childless remain: So Death
Shall be deceiv'd his glut, and with us two
Be forc'd to satisfy his Rav'nous Maw.

Although the image of death as a mouth, or as possessing a
mouth, is a literary commonplace that turns up a number of times
in Paradise Lost, this is the only passage where we find
all three of the terms glut, maw, and death
employed together. What is particularly noteworthy is that these
are precisely the terms used by the monster when he orders
Victor to create the female in the first place. Following an
initial disappearance of two years, the creature returns to
confront his maker.38 After rebuffing Victor's murderous
greeting, the monster delivers his ultimatum:

Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the
rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will
leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut
the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of
your remaining friends. (94;
emphasis added)

Although the monster delays making his "conditions" explicit
until he has finished his tale ("My companion must be of the
same species, and have the same defects. This being you must
create" [140]), this early
reminder of Eve is most appropriate. In making his threat, of
course, the monster implicitly equates himself with the figure
of devouring Death, an equation both fitting and ironic: fitting
because the creature is himself a re-animated patchwork of
corpses, ironic because he is a re-animated corpse -- the
maw of death was unable to keep him down.

From start to finish, in other words, Eve's suicidal proposal
shadows the monster's attempt to procure a mate -- from the
monster's initial threat against Victor's loved ones (with its
echo of Eve) to Victor's destruction of the monster's
half-finished companion (accompanied by echoes of Adam). Both in
Paradise Lost and in Frankenstein, the choice is
put in terms of procreation or sacrificial self-destruction.
Moreover, the choice, in both cases, is made within a matrix of
vengeful motives. Eve would, by double-suicide, deny procreation
in order to cheat Death's "Rav'nous Maw"; by accepting death
now, she and Adam can prevent future human suffering and death.
By choosing suicide and the extinction of the species, they can
{58} spare humankind from "so foul a Monster" as Death and exact
a kind of revenge against that Monster.39 Similarly, by withholding "those
sympathies" (and the procreation which, he assumes, would
result), Victor will have "sacrificed" (167) himself and his loved ones,
but he will be sparing future generations.

In fact, however, Victor's reasoning may be little more than
rationalization of a vengeful (and self-destructive) provocation
against his creature. The monster never once expresses a desire
for offspring or even mentions them as a possibility: he
understands his own needs in terms of spiritual and sexual
companionship. Just as his threat against Victor conjures up the
stock figure of Death-the-devourer, emblematic of the equation
between eating and murder, he also employs an oral image to
convey his benign intentions. Promising that he and his mate
will go to "the vast wilds of South America," the monster
stresses his difference from carnivorous humans and from
gluttonous Death: "My food is not that of man; I do not destroy
the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries
afford me sufficient nourishment" (142). But when Victor destroys
the bride-to-be, the monster naturally interprets this act as
one more turn of a revenge-cycle that is already
in motion, an act requiring a reply in kind (165).40

In Book Ten of Paradise Lost, then, Mary found a fertile
cluster of images and ideas that she adapted to her own tale of
creation and transgression. In light of her own personal
history, it is not surprising that she paid close attention to
Milton's striking departure from Genesis, his portrait of the
mother of humankind in the grip of suicidal despair.41

And suicide was to remain a leitmotif in Mary's life and work
through the turbulent years that followed the first publication
of Frankenstein. After the death of her son William (June 1819), she may have
entertained actual thoughts of killing herself, but they were
held in check by the fact that she was again pregnant (with Percy Florence) and by the
"inspiration" she experienced while writing Mathilda,42 a deeply
autobiographical work which presents a full portrait of suicidal
longing and may have served at the time to exorcize Mary's own
self-destructive urges.43 The drowning of her husband Percy
(July 1822) was
followed by nearly two years during which Mary suffered guilt
and remorse.44 The first book she published after
his death, The Last Man (1826), describes the
annihilation of the human race by plague and contains the
suicide of Perdita, who chooses to die rather than be torn from
the place where her husband has been buried.45

By 1831, however,
when Mary composed a new -- and largely fictional -- Introduction to her most
popular book, the gloom had lifted somewhat. Suicide was neither
a personal temptation nor, in writing, an exclusively serious
topic. A lighter treatment of suicide turns up, for example, in
the way she uses the figure of William Polidori, Byron's companion and physician,
to convey her artistic triumph in the ghost-story contest. She
writes that although Byron and her husband "speedily
relinquished their uncongenial task," her one remaining rival
stuck with it a bit longer: "Poor {59} Polidori had some
terrible idea about a skull-headed lady," but at last "he did
not know what to do with her and was obliged to dispatch her to
the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was
fitted" (225). While tombs
are standard stuff in Gothic fiction, we may still wonder why
Mary should have connected the Capulet tomb to Polidori
and to stillborn works of art. Since the Capulet tomb is the
scene of literature's most famous (double) suicide, the
association may have been prompted by the memory of Polidori's
own suicide in August 1821. It may even be
that Mary remembered from Romeo and Juliet the very
themes and stock images we have noted with regard to
Frankenstein -- suicide, tainted creativity, and the oral
conception of Death.46 But by the time she wrote her
Introduction, Mary Shelley had achieved a hard-earned distance
from her earlier morbid obsessions and could treat them with
irony. Unlike the self-destroyed Polidori and his tomb-bound
"terrible idea," Mary had survived her sorrows and had succeeded
in turning Death's maw and its contents into a lasting and vital
work of literature.

Notes

1. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
or The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text ed. James Rieger
(1974; reprint, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982) 3. All subsequent
references to Frankenstein, given in the text, are to
this edition. The passage is from Paradise Lost, Book 10, lines 734-35.
Citations of Paradise Lost, given in the text, refer to
John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose ed. Merritt
Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1957). In the
long-standing debate over the extent of Percy Shelley's
contribution to Frankenstein, the book's many Miltonic
allusions, including the 1818 epigraph, are often taken as
evidence of Percy's influence. Since Mary eliminated the
Miltonic epigraph from the 1831 edition, Philip Wade -- who
claims that the Miltonic element in Frankenstein was all
Percy's doing -- goes so far as to assert that "perhaps [Mary]
was unaware of the central importance of the Miltonic element in
the novel" ("Shelley and the Miltonic Element in Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein," Milton and the Romantics 2 [Dec.
1976]: 24). The argument presented here strongly suggests that
Mary had her own sense of Milton's relevance to her story. For a
full critique of Percy's influence on the book, see Anne K.
Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life Her Fiction Her Monsters
(New York: Methuen, 1988) 58-69, 219-24. Mellor argues that
Rieger overestimates Percy's contribution (Rieger,
"Introduction" to Frankenstein csp. xviii, xliv).

2. There is no agreement about what Mary
Shelley's borrowings from Paradise Lost might signify.
Different readings of the two texts produce (or follow from?)
different versions of their respective authors: an orthodox
Milton who is implicitly supported by an orthodox Mary Shelley
(Leslie Tannenbaum, "From Filthy Type to Truth: Miltonic Myth in
Frankenstein" Keats-Shelley Journal 26 [1977]: 106); a patriarchal Milton whose
misogynist tale is recreated and exposed in Mary Shelley's
"female fantasy of sex and reading" (Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Imagination [New Haven: Yale UP, 1979] 224); an ambivalent Milton whose
complex poem receives from Mary Shelley a "Romantic," heretical
reading (Stuart Curran, "The Siege of Hateful Contraries:
Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron, and Paradise Lost"
Milton and the Line of Vision ed. Joseph Anthony
Wittreich [U of Wisconsin P, 1975] 220), a reading that is "fiercely
unspiritual, skeptical, materialistic, even literalistic in its
guiding motives" (Kenneth Gross, "Satan and the Romantic Satan:
A notebook," Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and
Traditions ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson [NY:
Methuen, 1988] 335); a radical Milton whose epic contains
"revolutionary energies" which Mary found and "liberated"
(Burton Hatlen, "Milton, Mary Shelley, and Patriarchy,"
Rhetoric, Literature, and Interpretation ed. Harry R.
Garvin [Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1983] 20-21). Other critics
more cautiously suggest that the novel's Miltonic elements are
ambiguous and should not be seen as pointing in a single moral
direction (Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy: Shelley,
Mary and Frankenstein [London: Gollancz, 1972] 67; David
Ketterer, Frankenstein's Creation: The Book The Monster and
Human Reality, ELS Monograph Series, no. l6 [Victoria, B.C.,
1979] 24).

3. One well known formulation is that of Ellen
Moers, who sees the novel as expressing Mary Shelley's anxieties
about childbirth (Literary Women [Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1974] 92). Although
this view has been criticized -- Alan
Bewell, for example, regards it as reductive and ahistorical
("An Issue of Monstrous Desire: Frankenstein and
Obstetrics," Yale Journal of Criticism 2 [1988]: 105-28)
-- there is little disagreement that Frankenstein is
fundamentally concerned with procreation .

4. On the critique of male procreation, see, for
example, Mellor 115-26. On Victor's fear of female autonomy,
see, for example, Mary Jacobus, "Is There a Woman in This Text?"
New Literary History 14 (1982): 135. William Veeder reviews a
large number of critics who argue that Victor is essentially
feminine or at least has a feminine side which he represses
(Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: The Fate of
Androgyny [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986] 246-47 n. 8). On
the homosexual bond between Victor and his monster, see, for
example, Irving Massey, The Gaping Pig: Literature and
Metamorphosis (Berkeley: U of California P, 1969) 130-31,
and Veeder 91-92, 122-23.
Maternal absence is discussed by Marc
Rubenstein, "'My Accursed Origin': The Search for the
Mother in Frankenstein" Studies in Romanticism 15
(1976): 165-94.

5. The best surveys of the eighteenth-century
debate are Lester G. Crocker, "The Discussion of Suicide in the
Eighteenth Century," JHI 13 Jan. 1952): 47-72, and S. E.
Sprott, The English Debate on Suicide from Donne to Hume
(La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1961) 94-158.

6. Crocker 51, 71. Stripped of its scientific
trappings, after all, the story of Victor Frankenstein is that
of a man who abuses his individual freedom. As Marshall Brown
notes, at the heart of Frankenstein is a "Rousseauistic
concern for the proper relationship of the individual to his
community of fellows" ("A Philosophical View of the Gothic
Novel," Studies in Romanticism 26 [1987]: 289).

7. These facts are drawn from the annual booklists and daily
entries in her journals (The Journals of Mary
Shelley, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert
[Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987]; future references to this edition
will be abbreviated Journals). Goethe's story is on
Mary's booklist for 1815; she read Montesquieu's and Rousseau's
epistolary novels in 1816. Frankenstein was completed on
May 14, 1817.

8. "Life was given me as a Favour; I may
consequently give it back when it is no longer so" (Charles de
Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Persian Letters trans.
John Ozell, 2 vols., Garland Foundations of the Novel [1722;
NY: Garland, 1972] 2: 12-16). Mary's journals name several of
Hume's works specifically -- the earliest entry is November
24-29, 1817 -- but his essay "Of Suicide" is not among them. (On
the contorted publication history of this essay, see Ernest
Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume [Austin: U of
Texas P, 1954] 319-35).

9. Godwin edited and published the
correspondence in the four-volume Posthumous Works of the
Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). For
Wollstonecraft's own references to the suicide attempts, see
letters 168, 170 , 197, and 198 in Collected Letters of Mary
Wollstonecraft ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP,
1979). Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman (1798; New York: Garland, 1974; future
references will be abbreviated Memoirs) mentions the
first suicide attempt in very cursory fashion, conceding that
this part of Wollstonecraft's story "is involved in considerable
obscurity" (127), but the second attempt is described in detail
(132-34). According to her journals (319 n4), Mary was
apparently reading Godwin's Memoirs on June 3, 1820
(i.e., after the first publication of Frankenstein) but
she may well have known the book's contents at an earlier
date.

10. Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, a Fiction
and The Wrongs of Woman: or Maria, A Fragment, ed. Gary
Kelly (London: Oxford UP, 1976) 203. In his discussion of this
passage, Kelly writes: "M. W.'s first attempt at suicide is
probably described here. . . . Since M. W. did decide
to live for her child Fanny, the scene that follows, perhaps
drawn from life, may not be mere tearjerking" (231 n 2).

11. In her correspondence, Mary Wollstonecraft
several times refers to her little daughter Fanny as the only
reason she has for living (See, for example, letters, 159 and
162 in Collected Letters). Later in life, Mary Shelley
often said the very same thing about her one remaining child,
Percy Florence.

12.Memoirs, 135; see also William
Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (3rd
edition, 1798; ed. Isaac Kramnick [Baltimore: Penguin, 1976]
177-78). Mary read Enquiry in the fall of 1814, just
before she read her mother's Wrongs of Women.

14. On Godwin's Memoirs as the
imaginative product of his mourning for his wife, see Mitzi
Myers, "Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft: The Shaping
of Self and Subject," Studies in Romanticism 20 (1981):
299-316. The eighteenth-century English translations of Goethe's
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) included a version
by R. Graves (1779) using the spelling Werter. If Mary
read Godwin's journal, she would have known that her parents
were reading Werter on the evening before she was born
(Eleanor L. Nicholes, "The Death of Mary Wollstonecraft:
Excerpts from Godwin's Journal," Shelley and His Circle:
1773-1822, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron. [Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1961] 1: 188). This appears to be the version of
Goethe's tale that Mary read in 1815 and whose spelling she
followed in Frankenstein.

15. Benjamin Kurtz devotes an entire book to
Percy's conspicuous obsession with death (The Pursuit of
Death: A Study of Shelley's Poetry 1933 [NY: Octagon,
1971]). On Percy's own suicide attempt, see Newman Ivey White,
Shelley, 2 vols. (NY: Knopf, 1940) 1: 343-45. According
to Harriet, however, it was Mary Godwin who had threatened
suicide to compel Percy's love (The Letters of Percy Byshe
Shelley 2 vols., ed. Frederick L. Jones [London: Oxford UP,
1964] 1: 421n; future references to this edition will be
abbreviated Letters of PBS) a story later repeated by the
unreliable Mrs. Godwin
(Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit [NY: Dutton, 1975]
353). In later years we find Percy still preoccupied with self-
destruction. Two days after Mary nearly died of a miscarriage
(June 1822), Percy wrote to Trelawny in the hope of
producing some prussic acid (cyanide): "I need not tell you I
have no intention of suicide at present,
-- but I confess it would be a comfort to me to hold in my
possession that golden key to the chamber of perpetual rest"
(Letters of PBS 2: 433). A mere three weeks later, Percy
was dead indeed. Uncannily, the day before he died he told
Marianne Hunt, "If I die tomorrow, I have lived to be older than
my father; I am ninety years of age" (White 2: 378).

16. White 1: 470. Not only does this note link
"unfortunate" procreation and suicide, but it also employs the
dehumanized ambiguous terms which denote the "being," the
"creature" invented by Victor Frankenstein.

17. Harriet was apparently well aware of the
effects that suicide (threatened or actual) could have on
others. According to Percy's account of their early courtship,
Harriet had sent him letters that made a "favorite theme" of
suicide; he responded to them as an appeal for rescue through
marriage (Letters of PBS 1: 162). Kenneth Neill Cameron
offers the fullest discussion of the facts surrounding Harriet's
death ("The Last Days of Harriet Shelley," Shelley and his
Circle: 1773-1822 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1970] 4:
769-810).

19. Cameron refutes the theory that Percy
Shelley was the father of the baby Harriet was carrying
(783-84).

20. In an essay from 1920, Freud writes: "that
the various methods of suicide can represent sexual wish
fulfillment has long been known to all analysts. (To poison
oneself = to become pregnant; to drown = to bear a
child. . .)." ("The Psychogenesis of a Case of
Homosexuality in a Woman," The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and
ed. James Strachey [London: Hogarth, 1953-74] 18: 162).

21.Letters of PBS 1: 520n. For the full
text of the letter and a discussion of its history, see Cameron
(4:802-10). Percy's reaction to the letter -- like his reaction
to the suicide itself -- remains a matter of debate. See, for
example, Radu Florescu (In Search of Frankenstein
[Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975] 130), Holmes (354), and
White (1: 483).

22. Dated 17 December 1816, the letter was
written to Percy, who had gone to London to seek custody from
the Westbrooks of his two children. Anticipating her impending
marriage to Shelley, Mary Godwin speaks of "Poor dear Fanny if
she had lived until this moment she would have been saved for my
house would then have been a proper assylum [sic] for her"
(The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 3 vols.,
ed. Betty T. Bennett [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980-88]
1:24; future references to this edition will be abbreviated
Letters of MWS). I think J. M.
Hill is correct to suggest that Mary was probably more
affected by the suicide of Fanny than by that of Harriet;
although Harriet was "a more significant rival" for Percy's love
than was Fanny, the latter was "a potential rival" for Godwin's
love (J. M. Hill, "Frankenstein and the Physiognomy of
Desire," American Imago 32 [1975]: 352, nl8).

23. According to modern editors of Mary's
journal, she wrote cautiously, ever aware that her entries might
be read or even published by others (Mary Shelley's
Journal, ed. Frederick L. Jones [Norman: U of Oklahoma P,
1947] viii; Journals xv xvi). Concerning the suicides of
Fanny and Harriet, the entries are extremely terse
(Journals, 141, 150). Years later, in 1839, she refers in
her journal to "Poor Harriet to whose sad fate I attribute so
many of my own heavy sorrows as the atonement claimed by fate
for her death" (Journals 560); the full entry seems to
express both guilt and bitterness at being misunderstood by
others in the matter of Harriet's death.

25. Where some imagine that reaction as "stark
guilt" (Rubenstein 189), others
see Percy's "apparent inability to accept responsibility or even
express remorse" (Robert M. Ryan, "Mary Shelley's Christian
Monster," The Wordsworth Circle 19 [1988]: 154). According to Cameron, his view
"of himself as a selfless and dedicated humanitarian" made it
"virtually impossible for him consciously to accept any blame
for Harriet's suicide" (4:799).

26. The symptoms and significance of
suicide-survivorship are well described by the essays in
Survivors of Suicide, ed. Albert C. Cain (Springfield,
IL: Charles Thomas, 1972). Also consult the items listed in John
L. McIntosh, "Survivors of Suicide: A Comprehensive
Bibliography," Omega 16 (1985-86): 355-70.

27. See his letter of 16 December 1816 to Mary
Godwin (Letters of PBS 1:521). In a letter to Byron one
month later, Percy twice alludes to the suicide of Fanny, which
he curiously describes as "a far severer anguish" and a "thing
. . . that affected me far more deeply" than the death
of Harriet (Letters of PBS 1:530). Perhaps because
Fanny's suicide was more pathetic and less wounding (to Percy,
at least) than that of Harriet, we find thoughts of the former
displacing thoughts of the latter. To this meager written record
may be added Percy's six lines of verse ("Her voice did quiver
as we parted"), which are assumed to refer to Fanny, and a
single poem ("The cold Earth slept below") which is generally
believed to be about Harriet's suicide.

29. Although Plutarch tells the stories of many
famous suicides, the monster sees Plutarch's heroes as contrasts
to Goethe's Werther: "I learned from Werter's imaginations
despondency and gloom, but Plutarch taught me high thoughts; he
elevated me above the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to
admire and love the heroes of past ages" (124). Of the heroes specifically
named by the monster -- Numa, Solon, and Lycurgus (125) -- only the last commits
suicide (by self-starvation). Interestingly, the "benevolent"
and "rational" Lycurgus is named in Godwin's discussion of
suicide (Enquiry 178) as an example of the kind of
suicide Durkheim would later label "altruistic."

34. His suicide has also been seen as an act of
parodic self-sacrifice (U. C. Knoepfelmacher, "Thoughts on the
Aggression of Daughters," Endurance107), an act of obedience to the
will of his creator (Judith Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic
[Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981] 71), and an act of blazing
self-assertion (Massey 132). According to Wahl, one component of
aggressive suicide is the idea that "to kill oneself is to kill
everything that there is, the world and other persons" (29).

35. Mary Thornburg, The Monster in the
Mirror: Gender and the Sentimental/Gothic Myth in
Frankenstein (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987) 68.

36. For a list of Seneca's defenses of suicide,
see Anna Lydia Motto, Guide to the Thought of Lucius Annaeus
Seneca (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1970) 206-07. Percy read
Seneca's works in 1815 (Journals 92).

38. Though he says nothing about Eve's suicidal
proposal, Fred V. Randel also sees this confrontation, with its
choice between procreation and sterility, in Miltonic terms
("Frankenstein, Feminism, and the Intertextuality of
Mountains," Studies in Romanticism 24 [1985]: 526-27).

39. The debate between Adam and Eve may be seen
as a debate over means: Eve would get revenge by racial suicide,
Adam by procreation which will bring forth the "Seed" that
"shall bruise/The Serpent's head" (Book 10: lines 1031-32).
Stuart Curran suggestively comments that Adam's vengeful
perspective is "irreparably fallen even as it struggles to rise"
(224).

40. Victor's crucial destruction of the
"monstress" has been analyzed from a wide variety of
standpoints. For some readers, Victor in this episode is a
stand-in for Mary (Hill 340; Knoepfelmacher 107; Rubenstein 193). Feminist critics have
emphasized Victor's fear of a sexualized, incestuous
mother-figure and his fear of female sexual autonomy in general.
Those who see a homosexual bond between Victor and his creature
argue that the monster does not truly want a female partner and
that Victor wants no female to compromise his bond with the
creature. But a number of readers condemn Victor's failure to
provide his monster with a loving partner (Tannenbaum 110; Hatlen 37; Irving H.
Buchen, "Frankenstein and the Alchemy of Creation and
Evolution," Wordsworth Circle 8 [1977]: 111).

41. The argument offered here, which traces
Frankenstein's handling of procreation and suicide to
Book Ten of Paradise Lost, may be seen as supporting
Sandra Gilbert's claim that Mary Shelley's story "is a
fictionalized rendition of the meaning of Paradise Lost
to women" (Gilbert and Gubar 221). In Gilbert's view, Victor
and the monster are both versions of the silenced and suppressed
figure of Milton's Eve: Victor has Eve's criminal curiosity,
longs to give birth to a new race, but discovers that he is
fallen (Gilbert and Gubar 234).
The monster, in turn, embodies Eve's isolation, her fear of
isolation, and her sense of her own deformity (Gilbert and Gubar
239-41). To this list of traits
we may add Eve's death-wish.

44. On Mary's wishes for death, see
Journals (435, 452, 475,478, 488). She says, occasionally
with a tinge of resentment, that the existence of Percy Florence
forces her to go on living (Journals 433, 454-55), an
idea repeated even more frequently in her letters (Letters of
MWS 1 243, 252, 261, 287, 291, 300, 305, 317, 327). Despite
her overt wishes for death, however, she explicitly refused to
choose active suicide. In a letter of 15 October 1822, she says,
referring to her son Percy Florence, that "Percy wd go too, only
then I shd no longer be chained to time but shd depart --
without self violence (which I wd never use) I know that I shd
then die" (Letters of MWS, 1:283).

46. The tomb is insistently associated with
oral imagery. Juliet fears she will suffocate "in the vault, /
To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in" (Romeo and
Juliet, ed. Brian Gibbons [London: Methuen, 1980] Act 4,
sc. 3, lines 33-34); she wonders whether she will awake amid
"loathsome smells" and be driven by "hideous fears" -- perhaps
like Victor -- to "madly play with my forefathers' joints"
(4.3.51). And Romeo, forcing open the gates of the tomb to lie
with Juliet, delivers this apostrophe:

Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death
Gorg'd with the dearest morsel of the earth,
Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open,
And in despite I'll cram thee with more food. (5.3.45-48)